Reviews of Rollbar, Opbeat, and App Enlight

jontsai

The Absolute BEST Thing You Can Do for Writing Better Software

September 26, 2016 09:44

Team Rollbar--I LOVE you guys and your wonderful service! This review is far too long overdue.

Let me save you a bunch of time and make the decision for you. If you're not already using an error tracking platform, you must. If you're deciding between which services to use, just go with Rollbar, and stop deliberating.

Rollbar is hands-down, THE BEST full-stack application error and exception monitoring/tracking system.

I was an early user and first started using Rollbar in early 2012 (back when it was still called Ratchet.io). Suffice it to say, it has completely transformed and leveled-up the way I build and write applications.

Rollbar is now a must-have for any application I build. TDD? Yeah, could do that, or you can just be more lean and start building, and Rollbar will catch all of your exceptions for you. Large team? Even more so that you need Rollbar, so that you can detect and fix errors before they inconvenience your users.

Here are the reasons for why I think Rollbar is great:

Best thing since sliced bread - For the developers in the late 90's to early 2000's who remember it, just as Firebug and later on Chrome Developer Tools was to JavaScript development, so is Rollbar to development on any stack. Before, with writing JavaScript in Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer 4.0, all you had to go off of was that there was a JS error and the JS on a page was completely broken. Developers familiar with that old debugging technique will shake their heads today--manual binary search, commenting out parts of code until it started working again--those days are gone. Now, with Rollbar, you can know with certainty what parts of your application, down to the specific line(s) of code, are causing the exception.

Rollbar has an exceptional, world-class team. Rollbar is built by engineers, for engineers. I know because I've worked with a few folks at team Rollbar, including the founder/CEO Brian Rue, who has been a mentor and advisor to me at a few startups, and some of my elite former colleagues who were hand-picked to join the Rollbar team. They are extremely talented hackers and engineers.

Rollbar scales, an is extremely reliable. We're not just talking Mickey Mouse pretend scale, but they actually do. Guess what? Unlike most of the rest of the web, they're actually NOT primarily an AWS-based stack (yeah, because AWS outages can cause large chunks of the web to fail). Rollbar is in multiple data centers across the world for improved latency, durability/reliability of data.

Rollbar is extremely easy to integrate and very well documented. There are modules/agents for just about every stack and programming language. A basic setup takes 5-10 minutes.

Rollbar is thoughtful. In the early days of Rollbar, data wasn't scrubbed so potentially you could see sensitive information in the notifications you got. Now, they've significantly improved the reporting agents and UI so that sensitive information can be scrubbed before sending notifications, and additional sensitive/PII fields can be configured in the interface.

Rollbar beats the pants off of their competitors. The primary competitors I'm thinking of are Sentry and New Relic. New Relic is more for infrastructure than application, and often, infrastructure smells and problems are code problems. In terms of budgeting or planning IT spend, I would maximize spending on Rollbar and maybe some more basic infrastructure monitoring like hand-rolled Nagios or even Datadog (which also totally rocks, btw) instead of New Relic. As for comparison with Sentry? See next bullet point.

Rollbar is an adult, whereas Sentry** is a kid. Sentry came out of Disqus, and was built by designer-engineers. Don't get me wrong--they have good engineers, but not as good as Rollbar's. I don't care if Sentry is more popular atm or if the UI looks better; I want to know that I can have absolute confidence in my error tracking platform and sleep better at night. If error tracking services were facial hair, Rollbar would be a full, lush beard, and Sentry would be the teenage kid with sporadic prickly hairs here and there and some peach fuzz on the side. Rollbar doesn't rate-limit by default, which means you get all of your exception occurrences notified and tracked. It is 4K Ultra HD, if you will. (Though, to help manage costs and temper noise, you can set custom rate limits per API key--this is so powerful!) Sentry rate-limits by default, resulting in "sampling" error tracking which isn't full coverage and leaves you erroneously thinking that your app is in better health than it actually is.

Rollbar is "multi-tenant" (similar to GitHub) in the sense that you can have one user account affiliated with multiple organizations and projects. This is a nice added convenience.

Rollbar is enterprise-ready and has on-premise deployments.

As of this review, it's 2016--why aren't you using Rollbar yet? If you're still trying to hand-roll your own error logging system, I would seriously question you or your company's technical competence.

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jrdioko

Solid error tracking service

November 19, 2015 07:23

Our team has been testing Rollbar as a possible replacement for Honeybadger and has liked it enough to decide to make the switch! Some of the features that stood out to us:

Better UI/UX in general that makes the app feel more comfortable to use

Pricing is more affordable (assuming a reasonable number of events per month)

Powerful notification settings, letting us set up different issue severity and only receive notifications on what matters most (more signal, less noise)

Mute option (another way to cut down on the noise)

More logical error grouping (especially for JavaScript errors)

More powerful options for auto-resolving and cleaning up old errors

Nice "person tracking" functionality to see who is affected by various errors

Good asynchronous error reporting options in the Ruby adapter

RQL query language for powerful searching (although it's still a little rough around the edges)

We ran into a few minor annoyances:

The gem providing Resque support is developed by a third-party and doesn't seem to get much use (1 watcher and 4 stars as of the time of this review). Honeybadger provides native Resque support in the official Ruby gem.

There doesn't seem to be any search functionality on the documentation page.

No documentation and a slightly unintuitive workflow for one of the integrations we use.

Overall, Rollbar looks like a solid service that was easy to set up, easy to use, and has some powerful features for searching through past error data. We're looking forward to making the switch.

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MhdSyrwan

Rollbar is a lifesaver

January 23, 2016 14:34

Rollbar became a must for me in post-deployment exception handling and production-related problems debugging.

Here's a list of features that made Rollbar a lifesaver for me:

Report anything:

You can manually report anything you want, this feature helps a lot in debugging production-related bugs.
You can also attach a custom payload to be inspected in the dashboard later.

Performance:

You can use Rollbar-agent internally in your server to prevent Rollbar from blocking your business logic and routines.You can also use the common background job processors like sidekiq, resque ... etc

Awesome Documentation

You have a very rich documentation to read, but actually you'll just need the first 2 paragraphs to go ahead with it!

Wide set of helpers

For me as a rails developer i found a lot of helpers related to rails like: Capistrano deployment hooks, ActiveJob integration, Async error reporting and Rails booting error handling.

Real-time

You don't need to refresh the page each time to see the new exceptions, everything is real-time !

Free Trial

You can use Rollbar for free to try it without getting engaged in any financial operation, and you can also keep using it if your rate is under 5000 report per month.

Fast Support

I had a very good experience with their support, they respond in a short time and give flexible solutions.

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efridge

The missing link

January 07, 2016 06:26

Rollbar has been the missing link for us as we transition to more single page apps at our university. We have been using an in-house logging approach on our server side code, but that wasn't helping us keep track of errors that our users were experiencing on client-side apps written in Javascript. Rollbar lets us keep track of these errors and aggregates them for us. It also lets us mark deployment events and sends us a daily digest of errors as they happen. There are other services out there that do this, but Rollbar stood apart as being both professional and affordable.

The service has been easy to use and reliable. It's very well documented, and was easy to integrate into our stack. Obviously, you only get out of the error messages what you put in. They will log the person's IP, user agent, etc, but you will need to use descriptive log messages to know what's going on and where.

We are interested in converting some of our APIs over to rollbar as well to try to get a more wholistic view of errors as they happen. This is a very good service and I recommend them.

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yeroshkin

Rollbar – Powerful error tracking service

August 30, 2017 06:07

The guys from Rollbar made very useful error monitoring service.

We have implemented it in our startup weblium.com. This allowed us to see all errors centrally in one place and now our site has become significantly more stable than it was previously.

The main advantages of Rollbar:

1. Reporting all exceptions and errors
We just add simple Rollbar code and it catches all unhandled exceptions. Very useful and simple feature, that we use.

2. Custom error reporting.
We add some asserts on the most complex part of the code, to catch potential logic errors at the very beginning.

3. Real-time log.
When you have to test the production. Instant error logging helps save time.

4. Assign Owner
Each error can be assigned to the developer and can be marked as resolved when done. Very useful.

5. RQL Console
The new tool, it allows us to create detail data queries.
Very powerful tool for the analysis of problem areas in our code.

We have a very good experience with Rollbar. I highly recommend this service.

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rgsoda

Happy Customer

August 25, 2014 04:02

The best tool to monitor whole application stack. Also best tool to look for bottlenecks. Service is running without any problems for many many months. Best spent money for web developer tool.

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Nitrodist

Actually has rate limiting

November 30, 2014 15:32

There's a few reviews above that indicate that there's no rate or usage limits. There are. At the time I wrote this, there's a limit of 250 events per minute.

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How developers use Rollbar vs Opbeat vs App Enlight

We've only just added Rollbar but it's shaping up well. Being able to collate all of our errors with stack traces along with the current user and time is going to save more time you could ever imagine as we currently have to troll through docker logs one after each other just to find a single error where as with Rollbar we can easily search and even be alerted when something goes wrong.

At RadioCut.fm we think it's a no-brainer to use Rollbar: the pricing is a perfect fit for us, we like the different groupings, even the "People" tab where the errors are grouped by user, and many more things! Thanks Rollbar, keep building an awesome product!

Rollbar handles any unhandled exception, express route error, and any log entry of level warning or error. It notifies our slack ops channel and is integrated with github to allow us to create issues directly from reported errors.

We use Rollbar for exception tracking. It’s fantastic. I've used other things, but Rollbar is just really, really fast. Their speed at development is amazing. The features, you can tell it’s developers building it.

We are in love with Rollbar. Its deep integration into our Slack Channel keeps us updated at all times. We are able to push bug fixes in less than an hour. The pricing is very suitable for us as a Startup